Taxes

Category archives for Taxes

One of the things that has gone unnoticed during the Wisconsin troubles is this piece of legislation that passed: Madison – Today, Governor Scott Walker signed Special Session Assembly Bill 5 which requires a 2/3s vote to pass tax rate increases on the income, sales or franchise taxes. “I went to work today, met with…

The Fiscal Times, a propaganda arm for Pete Peterson (although how one could tell the difference between The Fiscal Times and the ostensibly non-partisan Washington Post), has an article that purports to describe how difficult it is for the ‘average’ family that makes $250,000 per year. If we spot The Fiscal Times most of the…

It’s safe to say that Thomas Watson Sr., the first chairman of IBM (International Business Machines), truly revolutionized computing. While I’m sure Sam Palmisano, the current chairman of IBM, is a smart guy and has done some good things, I haven’t heard anyone claim he’s a technological revolutionary. So I found this post about Watson’s…

Democrats need a better class of pundits, ones who aren’t so enamored of their own cleverness, while at the same time, utterly ignorant of political history. It would help, for instance, when trying to defend the estate tax. Matthew Yglesias, in a fit of contrarianism worthy of William Saletan, asks the following scintillating question: I…

While there’s been some discussion of the massive cut, albeit temporary, in the estate tax (arguably the tax cut least likely to produce jobs), the new gift tax rules are even more obscene: Families would be able to make tax- free gifts to their children or others of as much as $10 million, an increase…

Merry Christmas! Guess who would see their taxes increase as a result of the Obama-McConnell plan? Well: The wealthiest Americans will also reap tax savings from the proposal’s plan to keep the cap on dividend and capital gains taxes at 15 percent, well below the highest rates on ordinary income…..

Obama’s recent tax/unemployment deal with Republicans is a lot less demoralizing once one recognizes that Obama is a Republican, albeit not a completely batshit lunatic one. So I wasn’t really going to comment on the most recent Obama capitulation. But several readers asked me for my thoughts on the subject, so here they are: 1)…

He will cave, of course, but this is the right idea: And before people start pissing and moaning about ‘weakening Obama’ (he’s done a very good job of that all by his lonesome), remember that he and his surrogates kept quoting FDR who told his left-leaning supporters, “You have to make me do it.” That’s…

Because it’s the sucker’s play. So Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky–a real Democrat, not a Very Serious fiscal ‘conservative’–has released her own deficit plan. It’s a perfectly good plan: the numbers add up (no magic asterisks, such as ‘we will lower Medicare expenses [somehow]’), and as policy, even if one weren’t concerned about deficit reduction, it’s…

This should be the new Democratic talking point about tax cuts: We need to change the thinking. Taxes are not too high. Incomes are too low. If you are having problems paying your taxes then you need a raise, not a tax cut. Democrats need to practice this response to anyone talking about tax cuts.…